Georgia: Shooting yourself in both feet

A year after a short but vicious war erupted between Georgia and Russia on the night of 7 and 8 August 2008, the argument is still raging over who fired first. It is all down to a Swiss diplomat who heads an investigative commission to decide, and much rests on her report. Did Russia defend South Ossetia, an enclave seeking independence from Tblisi, against a pre-emptive strike from an adventurist Georgian president? Or did Russia provoke a crisis which allowed it not only to reoccupy parts of Georgia but set its military footprint on its near-abroad? Hundreds of civilians were killed, and over 190,000 were displaced. And even if you set the conflict's primary victims aside, these are not academic questions.

The EU is already manning an observer mission on the de facto border between Georgia and South Ossetia. If the fact-finding commission decides against Georgia, it would set the tone for a more cautious, less ideological engagement in the region. The diplomat, Heidi Tagliavini, denied a well-sourced report in Der Spiegel, saying a majority of her commission decided that Georgia started the war. Der Spiegel quoted one commission member Christopher Langton, a retired British Army colonel as saying: "Georgia's dream is shattered, but the country can only blame itself for that."

Much of Georgia's case rests on its claim that a column of Russian tanks was approaching a two-mile tunnel connecting North and South Ossetia when the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili ordered his troops to open fire. If the commission finds the armoured column did not enter South Ossetia until a day after the Georgian attack, as the Russians maintain, then what little remains of Mr Saakashvili's credibility will be shot to pieces. He had already amassed 12,000 troops and 75 tanks on the border, and he may well have been tempted into launching a quick pre-emptive strike against those Ossetian separatists. Both Vladimir Putin and George Bush had their backs turned at the Beijing Olympics at the time.

Even if one accepts the benign interpretation that Georgia was lured into a well-laid Russian trap, it was still a disastrous miscalculation. A year on, Georgia has not only lost a large part of its territory, in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and added another 30,000 to its burgeoning population of refugees. It has also scuppered its entry in Nato, and by implication to the European Union, a reality almost recognised by Mr Saakashvili himself. The twin projects of the man who led the Rose Revolution were to reunite his country and bring it into the western orbit. Neither ambition is closer to being achieved. He has gambled the fate of his country and lost.

But Russia's force of arms has also backfired. South Ossetia and Abkhazia's independence are recognised by Russia and Nicaragua. And that's it. Waving the big stick in the Caucasus may have had the opposite of its intended effect on the near-abroad. The Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, for years Moscow's closest ally, has ordered his top diplomats to seek closer ties to the west. Tajikistan is banning the use of Russian in its official documents. Russia's plan to open a second military base in Kyrgyzstan is being resisted by Uzbekistan. Armenia is thinking about a rapprochement with Turkey. Even ultra-loyal Turkmenistan is toying with the idea of selling gas to Nabucco, the rival pipeline to Gazprom's South Stream. This is hardly a region quaking at Moscow.

The west should not be in competition with Russia over whose influence holds sway in a historically volatile region. This much Barack Obama has realised. They should work together, avoiding the hot-button issues of sovereignty and ethnicity. The EU should help all the states of the region form an economic union with each other, based not on bullying but geography, language and mutual interest. A lot of which, unbelievably, still remains.